This study investigates the differences in cash holdings across P&L insurers in two asian countries, Taiwan and South Korea. Previous papers use the P&L insurers in US from 1993 to 1995 to investigate determinants of cash holding. They found P&L insurers with some characteristics that hold less cash.
In this paper, we extend the literature to study the determinants of cash holding for P&L insurers in a developing insurance market. For our purposes, the dependent variable in the regression model is insurer’s cash holding. By using eight years of data in Taiwan and South Korea, we examine whether the differences in cash holdings across insurers can be systematically explained by different characteristics of P&L insurers.
Our empirical results support that larger P&L insurers hold less cash than smaller P&L insurers in Taiwan and Korea. The P&L insurers with higher proportion of common stock will hold less cash. The P&L insurers have better ROE and higher reinsurance ratio hold less cash in Taiwan, but not in South Korea. Two dummy variables, affiliated membership group and foreign company, have no impact on cash holding decisions. The empirical results support that highly levered insurers hold less cash in Taiwan, but highly levered insurers hold more cash in Korea. The result find that insurers have higher expense ratio hold less cash in Taiwan and insurers have higher expense ratio hold more cash in South Korea.
The main purpose of this essay is investigating the determinants of cash holding for P&L insurers in Taiwan and South Korea. We truly observe there exist significantly different factors influencing cash holding behavior of P&L insurers between these two countries.